AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4770 On Linux

To those of you interested in AMD's new graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 4770, it does work with Linux. Right now you can run this first 40nm GPU using Catalyst 9.4, but you will see an "unsupported hardware" logo in the lower right hand corner. There may also be a few other bugs. Coming out soon will be Catalyst 9.5 and it will contain proper support for the Radeon HD 4770. The open-source ATI X.Org drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd) do not yet support the RV740 GPU and when adding in the new PCI ID (0x94B3) it will not even mode-set correctly. However, open-source support for the Radeon HD 4770 should come relatively soon.

The Radeon HD 4770 had launched last week but we had not received our hardware sample until earlier this week. We will have a full write-up on this powerful yet cheap GPU early next week, but for now we will say that this new graphics processor is quite interesting and does run well with the Catalyst 9.5 Linux driver. Our benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite will compare the performance of this 40nm desktop graphics card to the ATI Radeon HD 4670, HD 4830, HD 4850, and HD 4870. There are also results from the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT, which is the competitor part that AMD had designed the RV740 to go head-to-head against, but how well do they compete on Linux? Well, you will have to wait and see.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.